Sharing TMPGENC trick...
 

Started experimenting with using TMPGENC to create 1280x720 HDV format videos from the original AVCHD files on my SD1, using the PowerDVD decoder.

Found that if I have several files in the encode list on TMPGENC, it would always crash. Worked fine for one file at a time.

Since these are MPEG-2 transport stream files, I figured, it wouldn't hurt to just try concatenating the files together, then see if TMPGENC would handle the concatenated stream, so I put copied all the files in a directory and from the command prompt joined them:

copy *.mts /B all.mts

Which creates a single file out of all the .mts files in the directory. I was able to play the concatenated file in Media Player, so this was a step in the right direction.

TMPGENC gladly chewed on the concatenated file to create the HDV .M2T file, which I then was able to transcode to 6 megabit 1280x720 h.264 using MPEG_Streamclip.